I just wrote:

> Well, sort of. Emmet isn't completely off-base. UNIX was originally named
> UNICS (uniplexed information and control system), as Bruce says, a play on
> MULTICS (multiplexed information and control system). MULTICS was an
> ambitious operating system development project that Bell Labs, GE, and a few
> others joined in. Ultimately, the project fell apart, like all large
projects,
>  and to my knowledge never did produce a fully working operating system that
> could be commerically released.
>
>  UNICS, in contrast, was an off-in-the-corner, small-scale project in Bell
> Labs, developed on a PDP-7, by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others in
> 1969, comtemporarily with the MULTICS work.
>
>  In UNICS' first few years of incarnation, it's primary use as a text
> document processor, essentially a single-user word-processor.
>
>  The need to share files and documents among multiple users drove the word
> processing capabilities into more and more of a true multiuser operating
> system. The entire UNICS code was rewritten in the then-new C language in
> 1971 and was renamed UNIX (rather than the similar sounding homonym,
EUNUCHS,
> as some people still prefer to believe :-).

I wrote all of the above from memory, but there are several errors in what I
wrote, and we might as well keep history as straight as possible, thus let me
say these few things, now that I've looked them up:

MULTICS stood for "multiplexed information and computing service", not control
systems, as I wrote. UNICS was similarly named.

MULTICS did eventually become a commercial operating system, was commercially
sold by Honeywell, and surprisingly still survives today (see:
http://www.multicians.org/). However, what was not in error was the collapse
of the original MULTICS organization, which consisted principlally of the DOD,
GE, AT&T, MIT and a few others. The project was funded primarily by ARPA.

And although not an error but an omission of some importance, one of the
primary driving factors in converting UNICS (over in the corner of Bell Labs)
into a true-multiuser operating system was the desire to play a two-user game
on UNICS called Space War.

Wirt Atmar